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this is a love letter

Photo credit: Danita Thewalkingcrime

I’m sad I wasn’t able to make it to code4lib this year in Chicago. Instead I tuned in via the Livestream and have rewatched a couple of talks several times. The presentations that have been had the biggest impact on me at code4lib and other conferences are the ones where I feel an emotional connection with the speaker or when I know the presenter is stretching out of their comfort zone to push against the edges of what’s possible. The speakers who resonate most deeply for me are ones who take an emotional risk and name their personal stake in their work or give me a glimpse of the complexity of who they are.

Bess Sadler’s talk titled Creating a Commons moved me to tears at my desk. I love her values, intelligence and bravery. Her comments about community are spot on:

Hydra, in additional to being a digital repository solution, is a community. In fact, increasinly this seems like our primary identity. What we are finding is the ability to collaborate on common solutions is more important than any single project. This gives us resiliency and room to experiment. I think having a community makes us feel safe enough to take risks. And sharing work frees up our time to innovate. By trusting in each other and cultivating in each other willingness to experiment. We get to try cool experiments like Fedora4lib.

Bess talked about how she ways that she has hacked code4lib. I love how she modeled behaviour for “receiving a bug report” from a colleague about the original title of her talk. I hope she posts the text of her talk soon, because she there were some excellent soundbites about libraries, software, our values, “hacker epistemology” and concrete ideas on how to grow the code4lib community in a more inclusive way for the benefit of all. (Edit: Bess has posted the text of her talk.)

Mark’s post about his lightning talk is intellectually rich and has given me some big ideas to chew on. However, this is the most powerful part for me, where he makes the personal political:

Through depression and loss I have learned that keeping my emotions private was deleterous to my well-being. Making them public was a necessity, even to just a selected public. It also dawned on me that acknowledging emotion publicly could be a political act or bound with political expression, which I surprisingly discovered as also being present in some of Ann Cvetkovich’s more recent work. Expressing emotion itself could also, in some cases, become an expression or assertion of power. The hardest part of this, at least, was finding my voice.

Thank you Bess and Mark for talking about emotion at the most technical library conference out there. It was a brave, inspring and radical thing to do. The work that folks in the code4lib community is so awesome, but how we choose to do it is also awesome. Some days at work I lose hope that we will be able to accomplish our lofty goals. The work that people in the code4lib community do, the ways that we’re working to be more inclusive community, and the things that we accomplish when we work together give me hope.